Conqueror’s Moon: Part One of the Boreal Moon Tale. Julian May

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       THREE

      Snudge had sensed the mysterious overseeing presence, too, while carving the joint of roast beef that had been sent to the repository tower for the evening meal of the Heart Companions. Unlike his royal master and the Doctor Arcanorum, he knew he’d probably be able to trace and perhaps even identify the watcher if he could just get to the tower roof and do his search under the open sky.

      The apartment where the prince’s party had been secreted took up the third and fourth floors of the tower. The third floor, holding the castle’s extensive library, was the most attractive, having tall windows and a wide hearth with wood blazing cheerfully, and numbers of cushioned chairs and benches in an open area surrounded by rows of stacks. Conrig and his three closest friends among the Heart Companions — Feribor Blackhorse, Tayman Owlstane, and Sividian Langford — had turned it into their common room during the two days preceding the council of war, while they kept their presence secret from most of the other castle inhabitants. The prince had the chief scribe’s office for a bedchamber, and the three young counts slept on cots laid out between the shelves. They used the big central table for eating and drinking and playing at board-games and dice.

      The fourth storey of the tower, just beneath the now-untenanted guardroom that had a door opening onto the roof, was normally used by the duke’s controller of accounts, and for document storage. It was low-ceilinged and crowded with coffers of parchment and racks of tax-rolls. Vra-Stergos elected to spend most of his time in a partitioned nook up there, where he had privacy for his arcane studies.

      Snudge and the four young armigers serving the prince’s Companions and the alchymist also slept in the accounts room, but they were obliged to remain below for most of their waking hours, waiting on the nobles or the prince.

      This evening, Snudge and the other boys finished clearing the table after the Companions’ supper, gobbled their own, and put the soiled platters and leftovers outside the door for the castle staff to dispose of. Count Tayman, a genial Westleyman of two-and-twenty, challenged the other Companions to a session of picture-dice, and called upon two of the armigers to serve them that evening while they gamed.

      ‘Saundar and Belamil will play lute and flageolet,’ he said, ‘and keep us well-supplied with refreshments. Mero, Gavlok and Deveron may take their ease after turning down the beds and laying out fresh garb for tomorrow.’

      ‘Yes, my lord,’ the boys chorused. The lucky ones darted off among the bookshelves to open up the beds of the noblemen, which had mattresses of doubled bearskin, silken sheets, and pillows stuffed with eiderdown.

      ‘I’ll fix the alchymist’s bed while you take your ease at the fire, Gavlok,’ Snudge volunteered after they had finished, looking for an excuse to go upstairs. ‘Maybe I’ll take a nap before His Grace returns and has need of me.’

      Stergos’s quiet, studious squire gave him a grateful smile. ‘I thank you, Deveron.’

      ‘You’re such a kind fellow, stableboy,’ sneered Mero, who served Count Feribor Blackhorse. ‘Be damned sure we’ll tell Prince Conrig you’re lazing away in the sack if you’re not down here on the spot when he returns.’

      The armiger was a burly redheaded youth who had just turned nineteen, nearly as tall as his formidable master. But where Blackhorse was so slyly sadistic that you might pass off his cruelties as unintentioned, Mero was a flagrant bully who used his position to terrorize the pages and servitors back at Brent Lodge, the prince’s hunting residence, where they had lived for the past month. Mero was usually more circumspect with the armigers of the other Heart Companions and with Gavlok, the bookish lad who served the Doctor Arcanorum, confining himself to verbal assaults. When Conrig had unaccountably chosen Deveron Austrey, his young footman, rather than a nobly born youth as bodyservant on the secret mission to Castle Vanguard, Mero was incensed, as though the presence of a commoner — even one who could read, write, and reckon — in the royal party were a personal affront. He had been imprudent enough to complain to Count Feribor. The blackened eye he received for his pains was now a muddy yellowish-green. With fine illogic, Mero had sworn to revenge himself on the upstart footman, but a suitable opportunity had not yet presented itself.

      Snudge hurried up the iron staircase to the accounts room. He’d have to act quickly on the roof; the alchymist would not be attending the council of war and might return to the tower at any moment. Rummaging in his pack, he found a small roll of cloth containing short lengths of wire of varying thicknesses, cunningly bent, tools he well knew the use of.

      The door leading to the guardroom stair was locked, but a brief fiddle with one of the wires caused it to snap open. Snudge bounded up the steps and dashed through an armory crowded with compact defense engines — mangons and ballistas and catapults — along with wicker baskets of rocks, vires, and other missiles, stacked braziers, buckets of charcoal, cauldrons of solidified pitch, and crates of spherical iron bombshells packed with tarnblaze, having lengths of tarry cord protruding through their nozzles. The door opening onto the roof was only latched.

      Outside, he saw the sun descending behind jagged black peaks while the snow-covered slopes of Demon Seat glowed pink with lavender shadows. The air was dead calm. Smoke from the castle chimneys and from buildings in the town beyond the outer ward and the curtainwall rose straight in blue-white columns. The first spunkies, like infinitesimal earthbound stars, began to sparkle in a patch of marshy waste ground below the castle’s knoll. He heard a dog bark. Someone down in the inner ward cursed a squealing horse. The shrill laughter of women came from the covered colonnade around the castle spring.

      Snudge clapped hands over his ears, shut his eyes, and let the wind bear him away.

      And immediately found watchers. Not one, but two!

      Then came the difficult part. He felt himself sinking to his knees, finally flopping prone as the strength drained from his body and empowered his mind. He followed the thread of the first watcher, whose windsign he recognized too well, for hundreds of leagues northward.

      The scene seemed hazy, as though obscured by thin gauze, since he viewed it at such a great distance; but the details were clear enough. Snudge seemed to soar over flats of black quicksand exposed at low tide toward a ramshackle castle nestled between crags above a misty estuary. The place was Royal Fenguard, seat of the rulers of Moss. This time there was no blocking cover-spell at the terminus of the trace, as had invariably been the case when he attempted to spy on her previously. Invisible as the wind, he seemed to pass through the bubbly glass of an illuminated window in the tall south tower.

      And saw her: Ullanoth sha Linndal, daughter of the Conjure-King, only eighteen years of age but having the imposing presence of one much older. She was standing motionless in the middle of a room crowded with books, alchymical apparatus, and arcane objects of unknown function. On one side of her stood a tall candlestick, but the indistinct object it held was not a candle, although it glowed weakly.

      The sorceress wore a flowing gown of leaf-green satin, the skirt and sleeve drapes gold-embroidered in an elaborate pattern of bulrushes. Her long unbound hair, almost luminous in the candlelight, was a strange pale hue — silvery with the kind of faint rosy undertone found in the lining of certain seashells. The narrow face had prominent cheekbones, an elegant long nose, and milk-white skin. Her eyelids were closed to enhance her oversight of Castle Vanguard, their thick dark lashes resting upon her cheeks.

      After a time her thread of watching snapped and she opened her eyes. СКАЧАТЬ